On Fri, Jul 08, 2005 at 03:49:36PM +0200, Santiago Vila wrote:
> On Fri, 8 Jul 2005, Javier Fernández-Sanguino Peña wrote:
> > [...]
> > - Remove _all_ out of date dummy packages! (see #308711 and other bugs!)
> > Note: Almost done by ftp-masters, some pending and needs to be reviewed
> > to remove woody->sarge which are not applicable to ->etch
> IMHO, we should keep dummy packages around for at least two releases,
> to support upgrades which skip one release.
In practice, upgrades that skip a release are not supported. There was no
way at all that upgrades from potato->sarge could have been supported, and
it's not a goal of the release team to support direct upgrades from
woody->etch.
So keeping these dummy packages around is simply needless overhead, IMHO,
both in the archive and in the Packages files.
> Instead of a crusade against dummy packages (some of which are not old
> enough so that removing them does any good), I would like to see a
> crusade *for* dummy packages, so that a package which changes name
> without a dummy package is considered a RC bug and we are forced to
> fix it
While I don't think the release should block on having dummy packages for
all such upgrades, I certainly agree quite strongly that maintainers should
be doing whatever possible to support automated upgrade paths in these
cases.
--
Steve Langasek
postmodern programmer